Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson thinks the pledge that an Iowa Christian conservative group is circulating is offensive because it condemn gays, single parents, divorcees, Muslims, women who choose to have abortions “and everyone else who doesn’t fit in a Norman Rockwell painting.”

The Family Leader, a conservative advocacy group led by Sioux City’s Bob Vander Plaats, last week introduced a pledge that calls for fidelity to one’s spouse, vigorous opposition to anything but monogamous one-man/one-woman marriage, a cooling off period for those seeking a fast divorce, earnest legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act, rejection of Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman forms of totalitarian control, recognition of the benefits of robust childbearing and reproduction, action against any illegal pornography, and protection for women from forced prostitution and forced abortion.

The Family Leader is asking all the presidential candidates to sign the pledge.

Johnson in a news release and in a speech at the Conservative Leadership Conference in Las Vegas Saturday said the pledge gives Republicans a bad name.

“Government should not be involved in the bedrooms of consenting adults. I have always been a strong advocate of liberty and freedom from unnecessary government intervention into our lives,” he said in the written statement.

Here’s the rest of the statement from Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico:

The freedoms that our forefathers fought for in this country are sacred and must be preserved. The Republican Party cannot be sidetracked into discussing these morally judgmental issues – such a discussion is simply wrongheaded.

We need to maintain our position as the party of efficient government management and the watchdogs of the ‘public’s pocket book.’

This ‘pledge’ is nothing short of a promise to discriminate against everyone who makes a personal choice that doesn’t fit into a particular definition of ‘virtue’.

While the Family Leader pledge covers just about every other so-called virtue they can think of, the one that is conspicuously missing is tolerance. In one concise document, they manage to condemn gays, single parents, single individuals, divorcees, Muslims, gays in the military, unmarried couples, women who choose to have abortions, and everyone else who doesn’t fit in a Norman Rockwell painting.

The Republican Party cannot afford to have a Presidential candidate who condones intolerance, bigotry and the denial of liberty to the citizens of this country. If we nominate such a candidate, we will never capture the White House in 2012.

If candidates who sign this pledge somehow think they are scoring some points with some core constituency of the Republican Party, they are doing so at the peril of writing off the vast majority of Americans who want no part of this ‘pledge’ and its offensive language.